[CHAPTER V.]
THE CUCKOO, THE HERON, THE HEATHCOCK, THE PARTRIDGE, THE NIGHTINGALE, THE SWALLOW, THE SPARROW, AND THE HOOPOE.
SUMMARY.
The kokilas, the nightingale of the Hindoo poets.—The heron.—Kokas.—Kapińǵalas.—The partridges.—The Vedas instead of the enchanted ring.—The partridge as a devil.—The heathcock.—The partridge and the peasant.—The pigmies ride on partridges.—Talaus becomes a partridge.—The kapińǵalas as a cuckoo; Indras as a kapińǵalas; Indras as a cuckoo.—Rambhâ becomes a stone.—Zeus as a cuckoo.—The laughing nightingale instead of the cuckoo.—The myth of Tereus.—The whoop, or hoopoe, announces, it divines secrets; the blind whoop and its young ones.—It buries its parents.—The cuckoo and the hawk.—The cuckoo anyapushṭas.—The phallical cuckoo.—The cuckoo as a good omen for matrimony.—The cuckoo is deceitful and a derider.—The cuckoo as the messenger of spring, and as the bringer of summer.—The death of the cuckoo.—Cocu, coucoul, couquiol, cucuault, kokküges.—The cuckoo announces rain; the cuckoo as a funereal bird.—The years of the cuckoo.—The cuckoo, the nightingale, and the ass.—The learned nightingales.—The nightingales predict the future.—The monster as a nightingale.—The wind as a whistler.—The nightingale as the messenger of Zeus.—Paidoletôr.—The phallical nightingale.—The nightingale as the singer of the night.—The nightingale as the messenger of lovers; he now helps them, and now compels them to separate.—The sun dries the nightingale up; a wedding custom.—The swallow; the chicken of the Lord.—The seven swallows of the Edda.—The swallow blinds the witch.—The birds of the Madonna; San Francesco and the swallows.—It is a mortal sin to kill them.—The swallows as guests; sacred birds.—The swallow beautiful only in spring.—The swans and the swallows sing.—The swallows as babblers.—It is a bad omen to dream of swallows.—Chelidôn, the pudendum muliebre.—The sparrow as a phallical bird.—The swallow as a diabolical form.
The kokilas or Indian cuckoo is for the Hindoo poets what the nightingale is for ours. The choicest epithets are employed to describe its singing, and the one most frequently applied to it in this reference is that of ravisher of the heart (hṛidayagrahin). While I write, I have not under my eyes, nor can I have, Schlegel's edition of the Râmâyaṇam; but if my memory does not deceive me, in the introduction, the poet Vâlmîkis makes the first çlokas, when he hears the lamentation of a kokilas whose beloved companion has been killed. In the edition of Gorresio, instead of the kokilas, we have the krâuńćas, which is the heron according to Gorresio, and the bustard (Brachvogel) according to the Petropolitan Dictionary. Kokas, a synonym of kokilas, is also mentioned in a Vedic hymn.[361] The Hindoo commentator explains it as ćakravâkas, which must be the equivalent of heron, although the dictionaries interpret it particularly as the anas casarca. In the forty-second and forty-third hymns of the Ṛigvedas, a bird occurs which partakes of the nature of both the cuckoo and the heron, or bustard. Here the bird "proclaims the future, predicts, launches its voice as the boatman his boat:" it is invoked "that it be of good augury," that "the hawk may not strike it," nor "the vulture," nor "the archer armed with darts;" in order that, "having called towards the funereal western region, it may speak propitiously with good-omened words," that it may "shout to the eastern side of the houses, propitious, with good-omened words."[362] In this prophetic bird, explained by the Bṛihaddevatâ as kapińǵalas, the Petropolitan Dictionary recognises the heathcock (Haselhuhn), of which tittiris or partridge is also a rendering. A Hindoo brahmanic tradition transforms into partridges the scholars of Vâiçampayanas to peck at the Vedas of Yâǵnavalkyas. The scholars of Vâiçampayanas are the compilers of the Tâittiriya-Veda, or Veda of the partridges, or else black Veda. The Vedas sometimes occupies in Eastern tradition the place of the enchanted ring. In Western tradition, the devil, or black monster, becomes a cock in order to peck at the pearl or ring of the young hero who has become wise. In St Jerome's and St Augustine's writings, we also read that the devil often assumes the form of a partridge.[363] The Indian tittiris occurs again in the Russian tieteriev (the heathcock). In a story of the second book of Afanassieff, the Tzar gives to a peasant a golden heathcock for a dish of kissél, made of a grain of oats found in a dunghill (a variety of the well-known fable of the chicken and the pearl). The heathcock finds the grain. In another story of the fifth book of Afanassieff, a heathcock sits upon the oak-tree that is to carry the peasant-hero into heaven; it falls down, struck by the bullet of a gun that goes off of itself, because a spark, coming out of the tree, fell upon the powder of the gun and made the charge explode. The partridge and the peasant often occur in connection with each other in popular traditions. The shoes that the peasant took for partridges are proverbial. Odoricus Forojuliensis speaks in his Itinerarium of a man at Trebizonde who conducted four thousand partridges; as he walked on the ground, the partridges flew through the air; when he stopped to sleep, the partridges also came down. According to the Ornithologus, the pigmies, in the war against the cranes, rode upon partridges. An extraordinary degree of intelligence and prophetic virtue is ascribed to these birds. Aldrovandi asserts, in his Ornithology, that tame partridges cry out loudly when poison is being prepared in the house. The partridge was also called dædala in antiquity, both because of its intelligence, and because of the fable in which Talaus, the nephew of Dædalus, the inventor of rhyme, thrown from the citadel of Athênê, by the envoy of Dædalus, was changed into a partridge by the pitying gods.
But to return to the point we started from, that is, to the Hindoo kapińǵalas, we must notice that Professor Kuhn,[364] has recognised in it the cuckoo rather than the heathcock. A legend of the Bṛihaddevatâ informs us that Indras, desirous of being sung to, and having become kapińǵalas, placed himself at the right hand of the wise man that desired (by the merit of his praises) to rise into heaven; then the wise man having, with the eye of a sage, recognised the god in the bird, sang for psalms those two Vedic hymns of which one begins with the word kanikradat."[365] The god Indras is found again in the form of a cuckoo (kokilas) in the Râmâyaṇam,[366] where Indras sends the nymph Rambhâ to seduce the ascetic Viçvâmitras, and in order to increase her attractions, he places himself near her in the form of a cuckoo that sings sweetly. But Viçvâmitras, with the eye of asceticism, perceives that this is a seduction of Indras, and curses the nymph, condemning her to become a stone in the forest for ten thousand years.
In the first chapter of the first book we already saw the cuckoo in connection with the thundering Zeus, and as the indiscreet observer of and agent in celestial loves. In the Tuti-Name,[367] instead of the cuckoo, we have the nightingale. The nightingale holds the betrayed king up to ridicule, laughing at him. The king wishes to know what this laugh of the nightingale means, and Gûlfishân explains the enigma to him, not so much because he is able, as is supposed, to understand the language of birds, but because from the tower where he was imprisoned he had been the spectator of the amours of the queen with her secret lover.
In the Greek myth of Tereus we find united several of the birds hitherto named, and the swallow besides; the pheasant takes the place of the partridge, and the whoop or hoopoe that of the cuckoo. Itüs eaten by his father Tereus, without the latter's knowledge, becomes a pheasant; Tereus, who follows Prognê, becomes a whoop; Prognê, who flees from him, is transformed into a swallow; Philomela, the sister of Prognê, whose tongue had been cut out by Zeus to prevent her from speaking, took the form of a nightingale, whence Martial—
"Flet Philomela nefas incesti Tereos, et quæ
Muta puella fuit, garrula fertur avis."
With regard to the hoopoe, several beliefs are current analogous to those known concerning the cuckoo and the swallow. In several parts of Italy it is called (on account of its crest and appearance in these months) the little cock of March or the little cock of May. It announces the spring. By the ancients, its song before the vines ripened was looked upon as a prediction of a plentiful vintage and good wine. It has the virtue of divining secrets; when it cackles, it announces that foxes are hidden in the grass; when it groans, it is a prognostication of rain; by means of a certain herb, it opens secret places.[368] According to Cardanus, if a man anoints his temples with the blood of a whoop he sees marvellous things in his dreams. Albertus Magnus tells us that when an old whoop becomes blind, its young ones anoint its eyes with the herb that opens shut places, and they recover their sight. This is in perfect conformity with a Hindoo story (a variation of the legend of Lear) narrated by Ælianos, according to which a king of India had several sons; the youngest was maltreated by his brothers, who ended by maltreating and expelling their father. The youngest brother alone remained faithful to his parents, and followed them; but while they were travelling, they died of weariness; the son opened his own head with his sword and buried his parents in it; the sun, moved to pity by this sight, changed the youth into a beautiful bird with a crest. But this crested bird, instead of the whoop, may also be the lark, concerning which the Greeks had also a similar legend.